Boris Lipnitzki, born in Russia in 1887, came to live in Paris in 1921. There he met Paul Poiret who introduced him to this clientele, set up his first studio and began a career as an up and coming photographer. Beginning in 1924, he published his fashion photographs in Femina and Excelsior (Heim, Schiaparelli, Chanel, Rouff....), as well as photographs of celebrities (Josephine Baker, Dulin, Artaud, Cocteau, Jouvet, Giraudoux, Anouilh, Michel Simon, Colette) and of Parisian celebrations and society events. He spent time with the Russian community in Paris, visiting artists' studios and theaters, photographing ballet and theater decors, as well as the designers and the performers (Fokine, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Lifar among others). During the war, he fled occupied France, meeting up with his friend Marc Chagall in New York. After the war, he and his brothers founded the Lipnitski Studio, which, until the end of the sixties covered Paris theater, ballet and opera events. Boris Lipnitski died in Paris in 1971. His photographic production, as well as that of the Lipnitski Studio, the whole representing more than a million negatives and 600,000 prints, was bought by Roger-Viollet in 1970.
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